Kees Dorst - What Design Can Do 2012

[Applause] hey thank you for being here and let's get to business and oops that's the first slide okay what

design can do um I want to take you to a journey to what that designing out crime thing means and the kind of projects that we do there but first I actually want to step back a little bit so my

second degree is in philosophy so I have to step back from the world all the time and look at okay what design can do but why would people be interested in what

design can do and what is actually crucial in the broad fields of design that we have to be transported to other fields and be very useful there and then when you look at the

world and you click the button you see that lots of governments in institutions organizations companies struggle with new kinds of problems problems that are

much more open much more complex Dynamic and network than they used to be and they're open which means that they've got lots of elements they're complex which means that these elements are all

connected and there's connections between the connections so you can't isolate a little part of a problem you have to take it as a whole it's Dynamic you can't actually shut yourself up in a room and say okay if the world could

just stop now I can think about it and then I can think of an intervention and I'll be ready with the answer in 3 years it doesn't work like that and they're very networked which also means that not

only are the problems in society connected to each other because we are so very connected to each other now uh but also possibly the solutions will also be connected so you can't solve

these things in isolation and a lot of the things that you see in the press a lot of the things that you see happening in the world have to do with these new kinds of problems

and people find that very hard and people have been looking at design as a possible answer because designers have been sort of dealing with open complex Dynamic and network situations all the

time so they built up a lot of Professional Knowledge that's potentially useful on a much larger scale companies governments have realized that and I think a lot of us have done projects that actually address

these kind of things in the last years and then about eight years ago a friend of mine Bruce nbal wrote this paper in Business Week calling that design thinking and launching that into the

business community and it's become an immensely important subject for them which I mean I've been doing research into how designers think for about 15 years now so I thought that's really

good news and it's also recognition for us as a sector about the things that we can bring to a broader um Arena than we usually have um but I've done my tour of

the business schools and found out that what they think is design thinking has to do with um you sit in a room with lots of people you call that multidisciplinary and you use lots of

Post-its and you've got lots of ideas somehow and so that's say the designer is the basically randomly generating

creative idiot and it doesn't go much deeper than that and that's just think okay we've got this great opportunity now that sort of the word is out the design can do something but what is it

actually that design can do and it's much more than the kind of things that are being picked up so widely now and it's I think that's where we as a design sector have to say okay hold on this is

what we actually think we can bring and those are the kind of discussions that I'd like to spark here uh on this day so it's still a big question mark what design can do and it's still a big

question mark okay what do we actually see as the value that we can bring beyond the design sector and I'd say let's learn from the experts if you see what's being picked

up around the world under this flag of design thinking lots of the stuff is the kind of things that we sort of tell our first year students and you think um that's not the best that we have

actually and um if you want to learn from a sector if you really want to sort of see what a sector is thinking on its deepest level you have to talk to The Experts so I've been studying expert

design behavior for a very long time which is absolute fun because it makes you fly around the world talk to people that are really good at their job and asking them how they do these kind of

things and trying to find patterns really trying to say okay what are they actually doing and one of the things that you find which is surprising to other but probably not to this audience

is that they concentrate on the problem quite a bit and generating Solutions is not hard it's not seen as something that is very special but finding new

approaches to problems is absolutely crucial that's what they spend a lot of time on that's what they've developed their own ways of thinking for so while design is superficially always associated with oh designers create

great Solutions and they can draw and it's all very nice um maybe there's a lot of design knowledge on a high level on a strategic level that has to do with how you approach

problems and um this is a quote from Einstein who says that a problem can never be solved in the context to which it arose which is it's a very clever thing to say and it's also a very stupid

thing to say because if you could actually solve something in the context in which it arose you would probably never call it a problem You' just do it basically but it is true that a lot of the problems that we have in society and

a lot of the problems that organizations are up against um we are sort of stuck we don't know how to progress from that and you need to create new frames you need to

create new approaches to these so very stuck problems and I've been looking at these patterns of design behavior of these expert designers trying to learn from them as much as I can and doing

experimental projects here in Holland and sort of around Europe mostly and thinking okay I can sort of see a general pattern

it's it sort of looks like this and um I won't go into any detail but okay first you have to have an archaeology of the problem you have to have an understanding where does the problem

come from actually then you need to get a sense of okay what is the central Paradox what makes this really hard to solve and actually to my surprise when I

studied these designers they spend quite a bit of time really sort of getting to the Crux of okay this is the Paradox this is what makes it hard and then they just let that go they go okay so that's

not a way towards a solution and then what they start to do they start to zoom out go to broader Arena of stakeholders they actually go to the whole world more

or less they do an analysis which um in philosophy you would call a phenomenological analysis and come up with themes so from this whole wider problem Arena that they've created they

start to find patterns in that and say okay these different parties more or less all want the same thing they express themselves differently but there's a theme behind there that I can use and from these themes they start

creating frames as new approaches to problems and they start trying them out okay if I have this Frame would that be fruitful and would that really work

towards more solutions or is it a kind of a dead end and okay let's not go there um so they start creating these Futures thinking ahead and thinking back and trying out different directions in a

very very deliberate and exploring atory way so there's no brainstorming in these kind of things there is actually it's a very deliberate explorative process I've

always been sort of impressed by sort of these top designers they're all analytically very strong people they're also creative Yep they're not creative idiots that can't think they're actually

creative idiots that can think because you need that to actually sort of have this Motion in the process of proposing things and looking at them critically they then look at what kind of

transformation is needed in all the organizations that are possibly engaged with these Solutions is this possible or is this too big a leap or is there one organization in there that's critical

and then they look at how can I connect this actually what I've learned from this particular project to the broader Arena to to to other things in the world

and um there's much more to it than this but this is kind of a general pattern that I've been finding and uh if you want to experience part of that pattern we're

doing a breakout session at 11:30 that gets you through a couple of these stages the core of the process and and sort of think okay I know this patter I can sort of understand why people do

that it also resonates with my own design practice I sort of the good projects actually sort of work more or less in this way but then I don't want to come up with just say a theoretical

idea uh I need to experiment I really want to sort of try this out and uh um I spent quite a bit of time um trying to set up experiments that are big enough

and I can say okay I really trust this now that this is a pattern that is useful and that is actually worth telling other people about and it doesn't just work for me it also works

for other people and um looking for an arena to experiment in I sort of ended up in Australia and I ended up doing things about safety in

public spaces and that's called designing out crime uh Direct of a center there which is sponsored by the ministry of justice and the police and

other people and um I think it's an interesting arena for us as designers and it was an interesting arena for me because crime is actually a symptom of things that are wrong in

society and it's also very much connected to fear and it's sort of interesting because if you sort of look at a symptom and you

get the freedom to all go back all the way to the causes you start doing really cool projects in neighborhoods to help people and the kind of projects that you would have a very hard time getting

money for but there's always money for fear because we have troubles in society and I'm working with Hans buer from The

foner Institute and one of the things that he says in one of his books is okay more than 50% of the news that we get in whatever medium is actually connected to safety somehow it's a huge issue in

society and we don't seem to be able to deal with it very well because confronted with unsafety or coming from a feeling of fear there's two things that you can do you can

actually hide you can sort of shut yourself up in your home and buy sandbags and do all kind of countermeasures um that sort of works or

you can be completely open and you can make sure that everybody's your friend and then you're socially safe completely um now the hiding is a lot of what we do actually and it's not very

productive because you get into problems of say loneliness you're actually disconnecting yourself from the world and specially you're actually abandoning public spaces completely because well

we've got gated communities and we don't want to use public space at all except for drive through it very fast um so

that's not a very realistic option um openness is also not very real istic because we live in very complex Societies in very complex cities and you

can't be everybody's friend it's just plain impossible so there is a real problem there and what you see is that the discussions that we have in society actually oscillate between these two

extremes and there seems to be very little in the middle and the left side leads to countermeasures so putting up signs that people should sort of basically warning signs and putting up

fences and the right side leads to a incredible amount of well- meant projects to connect people but you can never be connected enough in a sense um

what I've been looking at wait wait a minute in these kind of paradoxes design might be a third way of actually approaching them and let's investigate

that um we did a project in this area in Sydney it's called King's cross and King's cross is the area where young people like to go out and it means that on a Friday night or a Saturday night

there's about 30 ,000 youngsters there basically in one street and a little side street and there's clubs there bars

Etc every city has an area like this and there's a bit of drugs there sort of late at night there's a lot of drunkenness there always is a bit of violence it's not a good site and the

City of city has been trying to sort of do all kinds of things to help this um this area so they've sort of done all the useful things of okay they've

cleaned it up they've sort of put different kinds of park benches there all the things that the city can they've literally sort of hung flower pots in the and in the lanterns and um so

they've done all their usual things and the police they've actually built a police station in the middle of the area which spoils the atmosphere quite a bit and there's a lot of police around that

but still it all sort of everything that happens remains at that same level and then they called us in saying well we actually can't move on from where we are

now we can't hire even more police we can't sort of force clubs to hire even more security Personnel so what do we do um so we just went in there with uh

designers and students and everybody and hang out and interviewed people and talk to people and we came up with this okay so the old frame is this is a criminal

problem and what would would a useful new frame be well one of the things that we tried out and you turned out to be useful was saying okay 30,000 youngsters trying to have a good time I mean they're not criminals they're youngsters

trying to have a good time it's just they're not very successful at it um 30,000 youngsters trying to have a good time that's comparable to a music

festival what would you organize if you organized a music festival well for instance you would make sure that people could get there and that people could get away uh now the peak of young people

coming into this area is 1:00 at night and the last train leaves at 12 120 ah so people are basically stuck there you can take a taxi but taxis are

expensive and the taxi queue can be a couple of hours long and if you're too drunk the taxi doesn't take you anyway okay there's a problem there

um also quite physically um if you would organize a music festival you'd make sure that you would have more than three public toilets one

of which is at the police station so so people don't tend to go there um you'd make sure that people know where to go you'd make sure that you've got these big sort of stages with the big attractions but you also have a general

atmosphere that is sort of where continuous little things are happening so you look at the whole infrastructure for people to have a good time and think okay what can we actually bring to

King's cross as an area to change these kind of things and so from that one frame of basically a metaphor of a music festival about 30 different directions open opened up and solutions just

presented themselves generating Solutions is not the problem then it's just getting to that frame so yes we've got Kings Cross guides now who are

actually of the same age as the um as the people that are partying there very approachable uh non-drinking mostly um and because there's lots of tourists

at and people actually don't know where to go so people mull around in the street getting each other's way and that creates friction um another thing is um temporary sign is on the street saying

okay this is actually the way to the there is a train station that remains open all night and it's about a 20 minute walk 30 minute crawl I think but

it's downhill um so temporary sign is there okay helping people just to sort of navigate that area and we've opening up laneways with all kinds of sort of a

little bit of more of a loungy thing um using projections to really change the atmosphere in the laneways at night so you're not all crammed into that one street basically getting frustrated and

basically really getting bored because you can't get out um so this is how we project on a bench and um we do all these kind of things and it just livens

up the area and it makes it much more safer Pleasant place to be so we're using something that used to be defined as a crime problem to open it up and actually to improve public spaces

because that's what we should be about that's what should be doing and as designers we work by seduction we sort of we can't change people's behavior but we can actually sort of help people

change their own behavior by providing them with things that they really want this is a different project um very briefly

um one of the first clients that came up to me was actually the railways rail Corp in New South Wales and they said well we've got this problem that the problem is we caused it ourselves

because after 911 we took away all litter bins from the station because people could put bom bombs in there and uh but there's more and more little shops around that sell things in Greasy

papers and it gets really messy so we need to do something we need to get these bins back and they done their homework that sort of looked at all the bins in the world more or less they come up with folders and folders of bins and say can you help us

choose and then you say well and by the way it should be really safe you go yeah that's a way to really sort of block a situation completely saying try to find

the bin where you can't put a bomb in well especially in Australia where there's lots of Mines mining everybody has dynamite in their back Garden more or less that's not so easy um so you

think well that's not the way to approach this problem but what is actually the problem well the problem is the false alarms actually because you close down the whole Railway system for 3 hours to make sure that there's

actually nothing wrong and that's a way for terrorism actually to have a real influence on our lives not through the things that go off but through all the scary things that we do to sort of avoid

that kind of risk so we said okay let's redefine this problem for let's try to sort of create a thing where you can't put a bomb in because you always can if you can put a can in you can put bomb in

um but let's find a way of creating a bin that doesn't that sort of can be cleared very quickly so this was the original design it's sort of a half half

transparent thing and um you can't look in Norm but there's a little remote control you can put on a light so you can look through the rubbish if you think that there's something dodgy in there and if you think there's something

really dodgy you can slide in an x-ray plate in the back of this bin and they already have a little robot that can do that kind of stuff and you go from um

say about 3 hours to clear a station to be sure that it is safe to about 10 minutes and uh so these things are installed now and they're working and we're selling them all around the world

and and working for so in the last three and a half years we've done about 74 projects all working with this Frame creation method all sort of trying to

find new solutions to these old problems and working for basically the major infrastructure Partners around the country um we've done a wonderful project for the Sydney Opera house but I

can't show it yet because we're still presenting it to them um and it's been a fascinating journey and all these projects work most of these projects

have been implemented um starting out sort of so we've got websites and stuff where you can see many more projects I mean I could tell 74 stories literally

but I I'm not allowed to um we're also doing projects in Holland now um we're working with the city of a Hoven because

an Hoven has a marathon and which is great it's a great thing to have um but it turns out to be quite problematic because the marathon it gets to be a bit

of a traffic nightmare lots of streets are closed off and the population doesn't like it that much for that reason so the the sort of the good people of an Hoven tend to flee the city

on that day which is not exactly the festive atmosphere that you want to have so they say well we have this traffic problem and we've been trying to solve it mean we sort of we we sort of very

smart in sort of how the sort of the Mariton route how it goes um we do publicity campaigns we do awareness campaigns we've got a website we sort of we rationalized the way we close off

streets a little bit and this is how far we can get and now we're actually me mega stuck because people are still very unhappy and what can you do um and we

started looking at the marathon and saying okay um the problem is actually that this Marathon happens to be in an Hoven which is a comparatively small City to have a

marathon in um but it's not it doesn't connect into the at all it could sort of be anywhere and that's a Pity because you do actually attract a lot of

possibly interesting people to uh an Hoven these are sort of based on this on the um the data that we got from the marathon where do people come from that

run in the marathon I think hey wait a minute that's a nice spread over the whole of Holland and Belgium and if they done some publicity in German probably

from Germany um that's interesting and who are these people well actually they tend to be very highly educated a little bit on the technical side of the spectrum and think well hey einthoven is

an industrial town that always needs to attract people to work there that's an interesting possibility and um with the things that we have now you can go on

Google Street View and actually see where these people live you can see what kind of houses they have and you can see well these areas in einhoven would possibly be interesting for these people to know because they don't just come

alone they come with their family for a whole day H it gets to be a different kind of value proposition um but what we we've actually done is we've extended the problem immensely going

through the process this is the widest we can make it and from that you can sort of start to filter out okay these values make sense and how can we connect

them together um so what do we have in the city actually what would a marathon of a Hoven look like what is specific for a Hoven that you could express to

people that run in a marathon and what kind of associations companies possible stakeholders do we have and again it's a much wider problem than solve this little traffic thing for us please and

then you end up with saying okay we can actually sort of this is more or less how the marathon goes now and it goes through different areas that could be themed in different ways you'd have

stakeholders that are interested in attracting people um and what you don't have is all of the marathon audience sort of stuck in the middle in the little red bit which is where they now

all are clogging up the traffic and everything but you'd spread them out spread them around the whole route of the marathon which means that that route becomes much more transparent for other

traffic so yes we are solving a traffic problem but we're also looking at it in a much broader way and making it a more interesting thing to have in your city um this is just one of the frames this

is just one of the possibilities there's many more of them but it just goes to show sort of okay what do we do very well as designers and we do very many

things very well I this um but for me the core of what design thinking should be or the core of what design can actually do for other people in the

world people in other organizations all has to do with creating these new um approaches to problems and um I think that's what we're really good at and I

think we should articulate that better articulate that more um I studied designers and came up with this one sort of process of this is how it could be there's probably other ones

too and let's just get together and discuss and see how we can if we say that we are important if we say that we are important for other sort of organizations in the world how do we

articulate that importance and um make a strong case about that which is what I wanted to say thank [Applause]

you so should we start fighting yeah um maybe the fight is a little bit about um the difference between um learning by doing

and learning by research can you tell us a little bit how you approach that um so of research allows me sort of learning by doing is sort of what I do

as a designer you experiment you try out different things um learning by research allows you to use other people's heads to get to a different kind of knowledge that you yourself probably wouldn't get

to so very quickly and but still I'm really committed to trying things out I'm not happy with just writing a theoretical book about this is how the world could work without

taking the responsibility to try it out so I was really happy in Australia to get the opportunity to actually do all of these projects and now it's sort of okay I'm confident enough that this

actually works um if you do the the nine step process it's about a two-hour Workshop in its shortest form and you can do it with relatively sort of

offices designers or non-designers and things come out this actually does work so there is a core that is valuable in here somehow and it just needs to articulate it now I actually want to

move away a little bit from uh the area of safety in public spaces because I think it can be sort of used for care it can be for used for many different areas but this has been the platform on which

I could do these experiments and it's been very useful there is also something you bring up bringing non-designers to the table um as practitioners in doing process also right um there is tension

with that how do you deal with that tension um you have to get people on the table um that actually feel the problem in a sense I mean if they're not

committed it doesn't work uh but if you have a fairly solid process of okay let's think about this now let's think about that now let's connect these two things hey there's creativity happening

in this connection you can set it up for people to be creative without determining exactly what they're going to be thinking um and designers sort of just do that naturally this is how

designers work but if you just analyze that a little bit and sort of push it apart a little bit you can actually see and you can create that kind of tension uh for people that are not used to think as designers so using the tension also

between designers and non-designer in the process yeah definitely I know that Lucas wanted to ask you about your PhD yeah uh I know case that that that you studied a very long time and you have a

PhD uh in design there's not not many people who who do that what and then you immigrated to Australia yeah and I'm combining these two facts in in one

question how is the design culture in Australia and how did a PhD change your look at design

um the PHD allowed me to sort of delve deeper into these kind of issues of how do designers think how does this actually work because as a practicing designer you keep thinking about how

you're thinking too and it just gave me the opportunity and a little bit of money to actually sort of delve into that um the moving to Australia is kind of an interesting one there was two big

reasons one big reason was that okay I've actually developed these ideas in Holland through the experiments that we've done here with young designers and other sort and other people and this is

about change this is about creating newness in the world and that's a very cultural thing and I do want to write a book that is not doesn't only does not only work in Holland so I need to try it

out in a different kind of context and is it is Australia as boring as I think it's interesting in sort of Australia is basically in Asia I've got sort of in The Faculty where I work now

at University I've got more than 50% Southeast Asian students it's a very Dynamic place and the interesting thing is I tried to set up these kind of experiments on this scale that I needed

in Holland and I couldn't Holland is has a very strong critical culture which leads to a very high quality of things that happen but sometimes if you keep getting criticized from an old

perspective it's very hard to actually do the experiments to start something new and I basically sort of um worked myself into a bit of a corner in Holland going okay I can't get this done I can't

these experiments done and I really need them so what you do now is you go on the web and you stick up your hand and you say I want to do these experiments who's interested and it was a couple of universities from Australia that

immediately jumped and said yeah we can do that here and that's actually worked it's much more of an open experimental culture and that's an interesting I mean you've moved away from Holland too H you

become very Dutch when you do that because you actually have to realize what you can bring to a different culture and what the connections are and what the value is that you create through being in that different

environment and um so for me Australia has worked for this very experimental phase but I still come back to Holland quite a bit to be criticized because if I only have to work on self-criticism it

sort of Peters out after a while so yeah great so that's a cue for you to criticize him when you see him uh out of the stage so thank you very much okay

thank you thank you [Applause]